As the tournament progresses to the Elite Eight, we are also just days away from the revealing of this year’s John R. Wooden Award winner, the most coveted media award that is granted to an individual college basketball player. Imagine you are on the award’s committee, tasked with trying to crown one player the most outstanding of the 2024-25 season. Which player would you vote for?
Player A: 19.0 PPG, 7.5 RPG, 4.3 APG
Player B: 18.5 PPG, 10.8 RPG, 2.9 APG
Upon first glance at these blind statlines, it is probably not that difficult to guess that one is Duke’s Cooper Flagg and the other is Auburn’s Johni Broome. The two superstars have cemented their positions as the best players on two of the top teams throughout the season, and much of the national media agrees that they make up a two-horse race for the Wooden Award.
What might have been far more difficult, however, is picking between the two. Traditional box stats place almost no gap between the players’ contributions — Flagg has a slight scoring and facilitating edge, while Broome is typically stronger on the boards. Still, those margins are hardly enough to make a clear case for either as the nation’s best player. Diving further into the advanced analytics, is there a decided argument for one over the other?
Efficiency metrics
According to CBBAnalytics, Broome and Flagg have firmly solidified themselves as the No. 1 options for their respective teams. Broome’s 30.3% usage rate and Flagg’s 30.6% both reach the 99th percentile in Division I. At these high volumes, though, the freshman’s efficiency is stronger. He boasts a 60.4 true shooting percentage (TS%), largely powered by a solid 37.2% clip beyond the arc. Broome, on the other hand, falls short with just a 55.0 TS% — his 56.1% shooting from 2-point range has been slightly stronger at the expense of a far less reliable outside shot.
Flagg’s value becomes even more pronounced when looking at on/off numbers. Duke’s net rating drops by 9.3 when the Newport, Maine, native is off the hardwood. In particular, the Blue Devils allow an additional 10 points allowed per 100 possessions in his absence — an increase that is in the 95th percentile nationally.
With Broome, the Tigers score an additional 10.1 points per 100 possessions. However, team defense has been significantly better with the senior on the bench, resulting in an overall climb of just 3.1 in net rating when he plays.
The caveat to examining these two players from an efficiency or on/off perspective is that the numbers are not adjusted for strength of schedule. Auburn went into the tournament with the second-most difficult schedule in the nation, picking up 15 Quad 1 wins over 19 opportunities along the way. Duke, by contrast, played only six games against tournament teams throughout ACC play. This tremendous gap in the quality of opponents faced throughout the season is a strong point in favor of Broome — his season may be considered more impressive despite weaker raw numbers.
Value metrics
A desirable metric in sports is a comprehensive figure capable of summarizing some notion of “value.” Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) are popular examples of such metrics that are often cited in MLB and NBA conversations, respectively. College basketball has various analogs that also help address the aforementioned strength-of-schedule gap.
One of the most well-known sources for advanced analytics in college basketball is KenPom. Amidst the site’s suite of valuable efficiency metrics on the team level, there is also the KenPom Player of the Year (kPOY) rating. A player’s kPOY rating takes into account their offensive rating — points produced per possession used — in conjunction with the number of possessions used and the team’s overall offensive performance. The rating also considers the proportion of stops for which the player is responsible to place weight on defense.
Flagg sits atop the ladder with a 2.673 kPOY rating. Broome trails with a rating of 2.307 but is still 0.755 clear of Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr., the third best player. Flagg’s kPOY rating is not just the best this season — only two players since the rating’s inception in 2010 have recorded a higher mark: Zach Edey in his 2023-24 season and Frank Kaminsky in his 2014-15 campaign. Both went on to win the Wooden Award in their respective kPOY-leading seasons. With their current ratings, if Flagg won, Broome would become the second-highest kPOY-rated player in its history to not take home the award, behind only Russ Smith’s 2012-13 efforts.
BartTorvik provides a similar value-based metric, Points Over Replacement Per Adjusted Game At That Usage (PRPG!). Though a mouthful to say, PRPG! paints a strong picture of a player’s offensive value relative to the pace at which his team plays, the number of minutes and the rate at which the ball runs through them. These adjustments help compensate for differences in box stats that are better attributed to a team’s system than to a given player. Flagg just barely beats out Broome in PRPG!, 6.0 to 5.7. This razor-thin margin indicates almost identically valuable seasons on the offensive side of the ball for the Wooden Award frontrunners. Notably, PRPG! lacks any inherent considerations for a player’s defensive contribution. If the committee sees that it's more or less an even race on the offensive front, defense could be the deciding factor in favor of either player.
Finally, we have EvanMiya’s Indispensability and Bayesian Performance Rating (BPR). Indispensability is meant to act as a catch-all, indicating how much worse off a player’s team would be expected to be if the player were absent. Flagg tops the charts with his nation-leading 1.00 indispensability rating. Broome is sixth on the leaderboard with an indispensability of 0.89.
BPR is a more interpretable statistic, equal to the sum of Offensive Bayesian Performance Rating (OBPR) and Defensive Bayesian Performance Rating (DBPR). Each measures the expected offensive or defensive points per 100 possessions above the Division I average for a given player’s team when on the court with nine average players. BPR is intended to give some notion of a player’s overall value added while on the floor, adjusted for team-strength and opponent-strength.
Flagg is comfortably first with a BPR of 10.93, followed by Broome’s 9.37 and Braden Huff’s 8.28. Though the offensive gap is marginal — the Blue Devil holds an edge with a nation-leading 6.58 OBPR against Broome’s second-place 6.34 — the defensive difference is far more pronounced. Flagg has recorded the second-best DBPR behind Houston's Joseph Tugler, whereas Broome is only the 37th best defender. The projected No. 1 overall pick’s ability to play at a top-two level nationally on both ends of the ball is the foundation of what might be the most pronounced gap in the analytics between these two superstars.
The advanced analytics affirm that both players are having nothing short of historical seasons. If the two players played in different seasons without competing against one another, it would be almost a guarantee that they both win the Wooden Award. When a choice has to be made, however, there is a compelling case that the overall value Flagg has provided clears the contribution of any other player in the country. It would be difficult to find any player in college basketball’s history that has affected the game on both ends of the court to the extent that he has in his rookie campaign.
All stats are as of March 29.
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